16 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website Today!

Speeding up your website is the only guaranteed way to get more traffic and make more sales.

In 2010, Google confirmed that site speed is one of over 200 indicators that impacts search rankings. Their data shows that when pages load slowly, people spend less time. Yet most of us put little focus into making our websites faster.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network

Whether you use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal or a custom-made PHP or HTML site, I highly recommend configuring a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

A CDN is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the internet.
When a client visits your site, static content like images and CSS files are served from the server that is geographically closest them so they are rendered much faster.

By the way, the load on your server is also drastically reduced thanks to a CDN.

CloudFlare is a free CDN and DNS provider among others. MaxCDN is also a great and affordable option to optimize the loading time of your site. They are both as good as they can get.

CloudFlare is a free Content Delivery Network

8. Minimize the number of HTTP requests

The more HTTP requests you have, the slower the loading time of your site will be.

Combine your CSS files, merge Javascript files, and combine images in data sprites among others to make as few HTTP requests as possible.

When I work on a client’s site, one of my major goals is to minimize the number of HTTP requests loaded per page.

Merge CSS files, use data sprites or data URIs in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests

9. Choose the correct file type for your images

Use JPG as your default. It’s the smallest and fastest loading file type.

Use PNG only for images with text (JPG rasterizes text which makes it blurry) or if you need a transparent background.

Minimize or even eliminate any heavy GIF files because they can drastically slow down the loading time of your site.

Although the following two images look the same, there is a huge difference between them. The one to the left is saved as a png file and weighs 102KB and the other one is a JPG file with a size of 18KB, that’s right, 6 times lighter!

Image saved as PNG

Image saved as JPG

10. Fix your 404 errors

Believe it or not, any missing file generates a 404 HTTP error and will definitely slow down the loading time of your site.

Always check for any 404 errors during the rendering of your pages to achieve the fastest loading time.

If your “waterfall” (the way the browser renders your site) looks like that (watch out for any red rows), then 404 errors are ruining the loading time of your site.

404 Errors Can Ruin the Loading Time of your Site

11. Take care of your page size

Although it is tempting to display a lot of content in each page, you should try to keep your page size to the minimum.

This is even more crucial for mobiles. Having to load a 2MB site via mobile in a 3G connection is a recipe for disaster. Take into account that users do not like to wait for more than 2-3 seconds for a page to render.

Does a new image add value to the site? If not, then you should not add it to your site. Simple like that.

Reduce the Page Size

12. Scale images

Never scale images on the fly in HTML. Create a thumbnail of the image that you need at the exact dimensions that it will be used in your pages.

For instance, if you have an image that it is 1200px x 675px and you want to use a “scaled” version at 480px x 270px, create a new resized version of the original image and use that instead.

This image links to a “big” version of the image using a scaled thumbnail instead of changing the dimensions of the image in HTML.

Thumbnail (Scaled Image) Links to Large-Size Image

13. Leverage Browser Caching

Google recommends a minimum cache time of one week and preferably up to one year for assets that change infrequently.

Set a caching policy for all server responses to static files (images, CSS and Javascript) so the browser can determine whether it can reuse a previously loaded file or not.

This is usually done by adding this snippet of code at the .htaccess file for shared hosting plans

16. Hire an expert

My goal is to give you enough information to get started optimizing your website speed.

But as you know, it’s best to hire an expert when it’s important to get it right.

One of my clients contacted me in order to optimize the loading time of his website. The website pages were taking a long time to load and visitors were complaining because the user experience was bad.

I updated WordPress to its latest version, migrated the website to a reliable hosting company and applied speed optimization tweaks to achieve the best feasible loading time.

The loading time went from 8.2 to 2.6 seconds. The first byte and start rendering time was optimized down to 0.147 and 0.384 seconds respectively and the number of HTTP requests was reduced from 96 to 78. Google PageSpeed Insights was also optimized to 88%.

Bounce rate decreased by about 10% within a few weeks. The client and more importantly the website users were happy and maintaining the site became a great experience.

To sum it up, optimizing the loading time of your site is a win-win situation for you and your potential clients.

Conclusion

Google ranks you higher. Users are happier. Bounce rates decrease. Conversion rates increase. And you make more sales.

Stop losing traffic and money. Start optimizing the loading time of your site today.

Today I’m offering a $497 package special for IncomeDiary readers. This is half my normal rate. If your site meets my minimum qualifications, I’ll take care of everything listed in this post. Mention IncomeDiary in your message and I’ll be in touch with you shortly. Start off 2015 with the fastest website you can possibly have!

This is a great list and covers all the essentials. Like Charlie, I have found Photoshop compression is OK but not great. There are better options out there. Given how important image size is to the page speed, you want the best image size possible.